To the Marriage of True Minds
by LittleLongHairedOutlaw
Summary: 1942, Philippe and Sorelli, recovering from his illness and loving each other. A short follow-up to 'An Ever-Fixéd Mark' and 'Alters Not'


**A/N: Very definitely the final installment of the short trilogy of fics that started with An Ever-Fixéd Mark and then Alters Not. Dedicated to bogglocity, for being a constant font of enthusiasm.**

**A slight warning for some mild sexual content.**

**Title, once more, courtesy of Shakespeare's Sonnet CXVI (116).**

* * *

Their wedding night comes four months after their wedding, such as the ceremony was (a priest and a registrar, two Irish nurses as witnesses, Philippe still confined to bed but with slightly more colour back in his cheeks.) It is not, even, his first night out of the sanatorium, nor his second, nor his third, but his fifth, and they are back in the small apartment she has lived in in London since she followed him to England.

Her neighbour in the apartment above, another former actress, has a government job and a car with a fuel ration, and she took it upon herself to drive out to Midhurst, so they would not have to find a way to the city, and so he would have some comfort.

Her landlady is sympathetic to her situation, has a girl for a ward who is surely only the same age as Raoul, and whose father could not afford the sort of treatment Philippe has gotten.

(Sorelli thanks God every day that Philippe could afford it, thanks Him even as she prays that the doctors' predictions are wrong, that he has more than a year, or maybe two, left.)

She is under no illusion that her husband is a well man. The disease has gone into remission, his strength is coming back, but one of his lungs will never work properly again, most of it destroyed from either the disease or the surgery, and there is a part of his chest filled only with blood.

A bad cold could cause pneumonia, and pneumonia…

All she wants is for what years he has to be as happy as she can make them.

(He's breathless if he does too much but his smile for her is always bright, and he tells her he is happy ten times a day.)

She holds him in her arms as he sleeps, and with his head on her shoulder, his breaths soft against her neck, it is almost easy to forget all it took to keep him here, to get him back to her side, all it took to persuade his lungs to continue to draw breath.

(She remembers the first time she saw him after, his eyes only open a crack, his voice so weak she almost didn't hear his barely breathed proposal, _marry me_. His fingers barely stirred in hers as she whispered _yes_ and the twitch of his lips was like a ghost. She hardly dared to kiss him, but kiss him she did and he tasted of iron and salt even as the answering pressure of his lips was feeble, and when he fell back to sleep she couldn't help the tears that trickled free, the twisting of her heart as she whispered _I love you I love you I love you _each declaration soft, each punctuated with another kiss pressed to his damp forehead, his closed eyes, the crease at the corner of his mouth, and she could not keep the words in, not a moment longer.)

Almost easy, but she can never forget, and for as long as she lives her nightmares will be haunted by the memory of him waking from an uneasy sleep two days after his proposal, gagging on his own blood, and the long hours she spent unable to sit, unable to stand, as the surgeons worked over him and in him to stop the haemorrhage. She thought she would die of waiting, of the tearing pressure in her own chest, wrapped tight around her heart.

(If he died, she wanted nothing more than to go with him.)

Between the bloodloss and the medication and the strain, he didn't wake for three days, and she cradled his fingers to her lips, and watched the slight shifting of his face, and couldn't bear to speak a word.

She watches that face now, that face she loves above all others, that was almost torn from her, and can barely breathe around the lump in her throat, fingers as gentle as can be, tracing each crease, each dip, each too-gaunt angle and thinks that this is the evidence that there is a god out there somewhere in some form, when Philippe is still here.

* * *

Their wedding night, postponed, is, he fancies, the happiest night of his life.

It is the first time he has been to a theatre in two years, and he has no idea what is happening on stage only that it is an opera, Tristan and Isoldt, and it is taking all he has to pay heed to the music, to not just turn to Sorelli and pull her tight to his side and kiss her now.

His suit is far too loose and he is tired to his very bones but it is more alive than he has felt in years.

They go for a late supper, but his appetite is still not what it was and the music is soft and tinkling, something melancholy still lingering in her eyes and he kisses her fingers and aches to swear to her that he is not going anywhere, not yet, not for a very long time if he can help it at all, but if he says it it will only remind her, remind them both, of the possibility that he might be wrong.

A faint tear shines in her eye, and he wipes it away as gently as he can.

He does not want either of them to cry, not tonight.

At home again, the drapes drawn tight, he prays against the air raid sirens, and puts 'You Go to My Head' on her old wind-up gramophone, and holds her close as the music swirls around them, and dreams of holding onto this moment, onto this night, forever.

Her kiss is soft against his lips, and gently he cups her cheek, and bows his head to kiss the angle of collarbone revealed by her dress.

Her eyes are searching, hesitant, as she pulls back, and he smiles for her, smiles to dispel that fear in her eyes.

"If I did not feel up to it," he whispers, "I wouldn't consider it."

And this time a tear does roll down her cheek as she smiles.

(She sits him down on the edge of the bed, and cups his face with both of her hands, and his kiss is gently insistent even as his hands fumble with the back of her dress, his fingers warm against her bare skin, and she strokes his cheek, and lays him down, and the pulse in his neck flutters against her lips, and his breaths hitch softly as she eases his shirt from his trousers, and it is two and a half years since they've touched each other like this, two and a half years, and if they are not careful it will be over before they've even started, but she presses herself into the hard muscle of his thigh, and his thumb rubs circles into her breast, his lips kiss her throat, and it has been two and a half years, and she thought he would die, and loving him again is like being reborn, but she loves him, she loves him, and he loves her and they gasp it between their kisses, into mouths and into skin, and two and a half years is an eternity and no time at all when they can have each other, when they have each other.)

He holds her, afterwards, and kisses her until his lips tingle numb, kisses her hair, and her forehead, and her cheeks and her nose and her mouth. Sorelli, his Sorelli, his beloved, his _wife_ and the tears he cries can hardly be tears at all when he feels like this, when she is his and he is hers and they are together and can have each other for as long…for so long…

She strokes his hair and kisses him and cradles him close and whispers_ I know I know_ and every word of hers goes straight to his heart.

* * *

They will love each other even as the bombs fall around them. When he is ready they will go back to Dublin, because if there is one thing he has learned it is, in spite of the memory of his Anglo-French father, that he does not want to die on English soil. Raoul will hug him the moment he sees him, his sixteen-year-old bravado fallen away in the face of his brother who has been so ill, who he has not seen for more than three years, who nearly _died_, and all the resolve that has kept him going will crumble as Philippe hugs him back, and they will each cry for how close they came to never seeing the other again.

They will take a house on the beach, down on the Wicklow coast. He will write his plays and his poetry and his novel, finally, looking out at the sea, and his illness will be in every line of them, beneath the surface, twined with his love for her, and she will go back to her dancing, will stride across the stage once more, and he will go to every performance and clap louder than anyone.

The war will end. Raoul, when given the choice, will elect to go to Trinity to study medicine, Catholic bar and the necessity to seek permission from the Archbishop of Dublin bedamned. There will be a Boat Club dance, and he has always loved sailing, has loved it since he was five and Philippe first took him out on a borrowed boat, but there he will meet a girl with tumbling blonde curls, deep blue eyes, and she will be a singer whose guardian once rented an apartment to his sister-in-law and brother, and he will smile to feel her hand slight in his, and ask her to dance, and she will say yes without a moment's hesitation because he will be the handsomest man she has ever seen.

There will be illnesses, there will be relapses. Philippe will spend a good deal of 1947 in the Newcastle Sanatorium because he will not want to venture far from home and the promised two years has already become four. Most of the damaged lung will be removed, and this time his doctor will not be an Englishman but a surgeon who seemed so much a boy when they shared a room once upon a time and read their way through a library twice over, but Browne will not seem a boy now, and the girl he once had Philippe write to in his stead will be his wife.

(Philippe, for his part, will be equal parts unbalanced and relieved over how the world has turned, but there is no man he would trust with his life more, not when it comes to this.)

Sorelli will write him every day that he is in hospital, will visit him almost every day and send him two letters when she cannot come in person. This time they will not be so terrified, because they know how the last time ended, and if the worst should happen they will consider themselves a good deal more ready than they were before, but the worst will not happen, and they will be endlessly grateful for it.

And this time, when he gets home, there will be only a few tears, and there will be dancing, slowly, to the waves and the music.

A year later there will be a little boy, with his father's fair hair, and Philippe will cry the first time he holds him close, and his eyes will be as blue as his father's to start, but soon will turn as dark as his mother's, and so help her but Sorelli will protect her tiny little boy with every fibre of her being.

There will be a last relapse, in the summer of 1951, but there will be streptomycin then.

When he is well she kisses each of his scars.

When he is ill she kisses his forehead and through the tightness in her heart knows that things will turn again.

And they will love each other through it all, but they will say it only rarely, because sometimes to say it feels too much like fear, and sometimes to say it feels too much like breaking a solemn vow, but it will slip out, every now and then, and when he hears it his laugh is soft and breathless, and when she hears it tears will prickle her eyes, but they do not need to speak it, not truly, not when, deep down, they know.


End file.
